Information matters. Whatever your line of business, whatever kind of information you might need to accumulate - sales, expenditure, client details, customer preferences, financial arrangements, supply of resources, anything that's important to the progress of your business - it's essential that you're able to accumulate and maintain that data.

Fortunately, there's no shortage of software available that makes it easy to manage and analyse as much information as you can gather. Yet for all the familiarity of applications such as Excel and Access, there's a much less well-known Office program that performs a vital task all of its own. It's called InfoPath, and it brings that information to you.

Perhaps collecting information isn't the most glamorous part of the process, which might explain InfoPath's low profile; more trusty Labrador than pedigree Alsatian. However, ignoring InfoPath does it a great disservice, and deprives your organisation of a highly versatile and powerful tool; it might also deprive your organisation of the kind of information that can make a real difference.

Collecting key data

Giles works at the headquarters of a nationwide chain of garage services, providing a full range of car and van repairs in every major town and city. Giles needs to maintain a database of what work is done, and what parts are used in doing it, but he wants to make it as easy as possible for employees to get the information from the garages to head office. After all, those employees are mechanics, not administrators, and shouldn't be expected to spend any more time than is strictly necessary in front of the computer.

This is where InfoPath comes in. It builds bespoke forms for collecting any kind of information, and requires no knowledge of code. Giles can choose from a range of different types of fields - such as checkboxes, text fields, and dropdown menus - and use the familiar Office ribbon interface to design their appearance and content. Alternatively, he can simply download a template, providing a prebuilt form that he can customise to suit his needs.

And the InfoPath form isn't any more complicated for the end user, either. No special software or skills are needed: InfoPath produces web forms, which can be accessed and completed through any web browser. Filling in forms in this way is something that we're all familiar with, as it's no more complex than entering personal details to register on a website. What's more, the user doesn't even have to be online to enter information into a form, as InfoPath integrates with Microsoft SharePoint so that data entered offline will be transferred to the database automatically as soon as the user goes online again.

Making requests

Loxbury District Hospital serves a large urban area, and helps thousands of patients across a vast range of emergency and persistent conditions. Many of the departments have to work with a great deal of single use equipment and materials in their everyday work, such as bandages, swabs, gloves, syringes, plaster, intravenous needles, anything that the treatment requires. Accordingly, staff need to make sure that they don't run out of anything, as the consequences of not having the right equipment on hand can be disastrous.

InfoPath can help out here, too. As well as gathering data, forms can also be created to handle requests, just as easily and quickly; a simple form can be made available to each department, enabling them to pass on a request for extra items with just a few clicks, and to be confident that the the InfoPath form will have been set up to direct the information straight to where it needs to go for the request to be deal with.

Enhancements

InfoPath forms can be built to fit any number situations with no need for coding or expertise. However, if you do have some coding knowledge, there's no limit to how extensively the forms can be customised and enhanced; InfoPath gives you the power to make just the forms you need, and works with however much or little knowledge and experience you have.

Jeanette manages IT issues at the head office of a large financial organisation. With every department using a variety of software for many different purposes, she's aware that a lot can go wrong - from software and hardware errors, and also from user error. To make sure that problems and queries can easily be raised by any member of staff, Jeanette uses InfoPath and her own coding knowledge to create forms that specifically deal with the circumstances of the company she works for. Because these bespoke forms are so precisely suited to the situations that staff members come across every day, anyone can feel comfortable contacting IT with their concerns.

The key to InfoPath's success is that it's able to provide bespoke solutions to fit both the demands of the business and the skills of the user. A short training course could help you to make the most of this powerful and versatile tool - and bringing InfoPath forms into your organisation allows you to take control like never before.